Wednesday, 17 September 2014

Blog Shout Out - Scott Marlowe's Author Blog

In this week's blog shout out we visit Scott Marlowe's author blog. Like many author blogs he covers more topics than just his own writing. Discover more in his post below:

My name is Scott Marlowe. I’m a fantasy author, software engineer, and blogger at scottmarlowe.com. I write both novels and short stories, with my more notable works including the Alchemancer series of steamfantasy novels and my Assassin Without a Name series of short stories and novellas. I’ve been an engineer for over twenty years now and a blogger since June 2006. I’ve penned somewhere around 700 blog posts over that time.

Seven hundred may or may not seem like a lot, depending on your perspective. But considering I was one of those people who for a long time didn’t see the point in blogging, I think it’s fairly impressive. My viewpoint on blogging has obviously changed since then since I’m still doing it and, looking back at some of those early posts where I was very much still trying to figure out how best to use the platform, I can see how my blog’s content has evolved along a pattern which I bet is familiar to other writers.

In the beginning, the focus of my blog’s content was on sharing information which other writers and even fans of the fantasy genre as a whole might find useful. Posts such as “How Much Time Should Writers Spend Blogging?” and “Has the fantasy genre become stagnant?” catered to these audiences. I also used to write up book reviews; my review of Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son Trilogy remains one of my most visited posts even today.

Also, in those early days, I attempted to occasionally report on industry news and had a weekly series going called “Weekend Links”, where I collected a batch of useful, interesting, or fun links which I thought might be of interest to readers, authors, and fans of the sf/f/h genres. I also started to show my frustration with the traditional publishing model when I wrote “Response Times: Why do we put up with them?”, which is kind of a humorous post where I lament about how I received a rejection letter from Baen Books so long after I’d made my submission that I’d forgotten that I’d even made the submission.

In terms of overall popularity, two posts of mine stand out above all others: one describing the various eBook file formats and another which breaks down, at that time, the Big 6 publishers. It turns out there are a lot of people out there interested in figuring out which imprint belongs to which publisher.Nowadays, with writing taking up most if not all of my author time, I typically blog about where I’m at with a particular project, provide readers with info about the people and places of the world I set my fiction in, and occasionally write about some of the fantastical science I use in my books, like in a recent post entitled, “What is Negative Energy?”.

Blogging has become primarily about connecting with readers and letting them know that I’m still out here, writing away and trying to get the next project into their hands. All of it is a challenge with a full-time day job, but I keep my focus on producing a quality product regardless of the time it takes.

I want to thank Michael once more for letting me take over his blog for a bit and I hope we do this again.